The World Wide Web and other Internet-based applications have begun to replace print-based publications for many readers and for many kinds of content. For example, the contents of most major newspapers are now available through web sites and iPad apps. The same is true for many magazines and other periodicals that were once available only in print form.
Significant effort has been directed to making such online content easy to read and navigate. For example, news web sites typically provide a home page that lists the headlines and summaries of current articles, much like the cover page of a traditional print newspaper. The headlines of such articles contain hyperlinks to the bodies of the articles, so that users can navigate to the beginning of an article by clicking on its headline. Users can then scroll vertically through the article using a scrollbar and/or cursor navigation keys, and browse from page to page by clicking on “next page” and “previous page” buttons. The author of a particular news article may mark up the article's text with hyperlinks to related content on the same web site or other web sites, thereby allowing the user to navigate to such related content by clicking on the hyperlinks. Advertisements may be displayed in connection with the article content, such as in the form of banner advertisements displayed alongside the article content or pop-up advertisements that appear in new windows displayed on top of the article content.
These conventional techniques for displaying web site content and for enabling users to navigate through such content have a variety of drawbacks. For example, as mentioned above, pop-up advertisements typically appear on top of and thereby obscure the main article content. If such advertisements are displayed automatically (e.g., even if the user does not click on a link or otherwise affirmatively request that the advertisement be displayed), then the advertisement may interrupt the user's experience of reading the main article content. To return to reading the main article, the user must then move or close the pop-up window. Users who become frustrated with this experience may eventually disable pop-up ads from being displayed permanently. This may be disadvantageous not only to the advertiser and the web site owner by decreasing their advertising revenue, but also to the user, who may wish to see relevant advertisements but in a less obtrusive way.
A related disadvantage of conventional techniques for displaying web site content and for enabling users to navigate through such content is that they can make it difficult for users to engage in the kind of nonlinear exploration of content for which the Web and hypertext were designed. For example, if a user clicks on a hyperlink within a news article, the destination (target) of the hyperlink typically is displayed by refreshing the current web page to contain the destination content, or by opening the destination content in a new tab or a new window. In any of these cases, it can be difficult, tedious, and time-consuming for the user to return to the point in the original article that contains the hyperlink. For example, if clicking on the hyperlink caused the current web browser window to be refreshed so that the original article was replaced with the destination content, returning to the original article typically requires clicking on the browser's “back” button or clicking on a “return to article” link. If the user has followed several additional links after clicking on the original link, the user may need to click on the “back” button several times or otherwise engage in several actions. Sometimes such efforts to return to the original article content fail, thereby requiring the user to re-enter the URL of the original article content or otherwise engage in other manual effort to return to the original article. These and other problems are frustrating to the user, because they make it difficult for the user to navigate through hyperlinked content, and are undesirable from the point of view of the original web site owner, because they increase the likelihood that a user who leaves the original web site by clicking on a hyperlink will not subsequently return to the web site.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for improved techniques for rendering hyperlinked content and for enabling users to navigate such content.